Kev, skyu, and other Indian pastas you’ve probably never heard of

For most of us, the word ‘pasta’ conjures up images of Julia Roberts lapping a bowl of tomato sauce-doused spaghetti on the streets of Rome in Eat Pray Love. For me, it also brings to mind a deftly rolled piece of ravioli, pregnant with pumpkin puree, braised in sage-butter sauce, just like the one I ate for dinner last night.

It’s difficult to associate pasta with anything Indian, especially when most of us have been unfortunate witnesses to “fusion” menus featuring dishes like penne in butter chicken—a tasting that I have, without much success, tried to erase from my memory.

This was all until last year, when I chanced upon locally-made artisanal Indian pasta on a trip to Spiti Valley. Little cafés tucked in crannies of this Himachali town serve weary trekkers a bowl of house-made wheat pasta called kev. Kev resembles strozzapreti, a hand-rolled pasta of Tuscan origins; only, the Indian counterpart is denser, and tossed with mountain beans, plump tomatoes and Indian spices. Kev is just one of the several varieties of pasta that are hidden in the regional kitchens of India.

On the Ladakhi side of the state, sparsely but surely, you’ll find bhatsa marku—a Tibetan-style buttered mac and cheese dish made from yak cheese. Sampled more commonly is skyu, an ear-shaped orecchiette-like pasta. Though traditionally cooked in goat’s milk, contemporary versions of skyu are made with cow’s milk and tossed with earthy mushrooms.

“In the Malabar region, you’ll find kakka roti, which consists of gnocchi like dumplings made of rice, steamed, shaped and finished off in a bubbling gravy,” says Bengaluru-based food writer Aysha Tanya. Tanya is the co-founder of The Goya Journal, an online multimedia platform for food. She also chronicles her contemporary Malabari culinary experiments on her blog Malabartearoom.com. She adds that kakka roti is popular during Ramadan as it translates into a wholesome, one-pan dish containing vegetables, proteins and carbs.

Second servingAnother way of looking at Indian pasta is through traditional dishes from hyper-regional kitchens that use pasta as an ingredient. For many Sindhis, macaroni is cooked with everything from fox nuts and minced lamb to green peas. “It’s not an anomaly; it’s like adding potatoes to a dish,” says Mumbai-based food blogger Ankiet Gulabani of Bellyovermind.com. Gulabani shares an anecdote from his grandmother to illustrate this: “She told me that Sindhis were originally traders and often travelled back with new ingredients for their kitchens, and pasta is one such ingredient,” he recalls. This may have given birth to macaroni dishes in the Sindhi kitchen, such as the popular macrolyun patata, a dish usually served alongside chapattis in urban Sindhi homes.

Another community that nonchalantly uses pasta are the Bohris. The Gujarati-speaking Muslims are known for a dish called dabba gosht. Nafisa Kapadia, founder of The Bohri Kitchen in Mumbai, says, “Back in the day, people didn’t have ovens. So, this dish was cooked in a heavy dabba on the stove and inverted into what can be described as a modern-day pasta pie or casserole.” Though she doesn’t recall exactly when chefs started adding everything from spaghetti to penne into this curried meat dish, Kapadia confirms it’s at least a decade-old trend.

Websites like Food52.com and Pinterest even call out to dal dhokli as a “lentil pasta.” This traditional Gujarati dish, just like kev, skyu, kakka roti and dabba gosht, may not be pasta in the traditional sense, but it is essentially the same—dough bubbled in hot liquid served with a sauce.

Method:
• Marinate the lamb with yoghurt and lime juice and keep aside. Meanwhile, on a hot pan toast the dal and wheat together and proceed to powder it to a fine mixture. Set aside.
• Mash the potato and add milk, butter, cheese, salt and pepper while it is still hot.
• Heat oil in a pan. Add finely chopped onions with the ginger-garlic paste and fry this for two to three minutes.
• Add minced lamb and sauté over high heat for 15 minutes.
• The lamb will let out a lot of water. When it starts to dry out again, add garam masala powder, cumin powder, coriander powder, chilli powder, ajwain powder, rose petals, green chillies and salt. Give it a good stir.
• Add lamb stock and ghee, and cover the pan. Lower the heat to a simmer and cook till the mince is soft. Then add the roasted dal and wheat mixture followed by dry macaroni and peas. Stir well and let it cook uncovered till the macaroni is almost done and the mutton mince mixture is reduced.
• Adjust seasoning and transfer this mixture to an oven-proof casserole.
• Cover it with mashed potatoes and bake for 30-45 minutes at 200°C. Serve hot.

Method:
• In a food processor, mix all the ingredients for the dumplings, except the rice flour.
• Transfer into a plate and add rice flour and knead it into a medium-soft dough and roll it into small balls.
• Indent it with the tip of your finger and steam-cook these dumplings for 15-20 minutes and keep aside.
• In a pan, heat oil, add onions and sauté on medium flame until light brown. Add green chillies, spinach and fennel seed powder, and sauté until spinach wilts.
• Pour in the thin coconut milk, add salt and, reducing the flame, cook for five minutes.
• Add the steamed dumplings, the thick coconut milk and boil until it starts to simmer.
• Add more salt if needed.
• Remove from heat and serve.